Seeing Red

After two rounds, there’s a lot of red on our brackets—and on almost everyone else’s. ESPN said over the weekend that more than forty per cent of the people who were enrolled in their Tournament Challenge had picked Kansas to win it all (in The New Yorker’s office pool, it was more than fifty per cent). Further, none of the nearly five million ESPN entrants had correctly forecast the first two rounds of the tournament. So, does anyone in the country still have an unblemished bracket? The President doesn’t. Nor does Dick Vitale or LeBron James. But apparently there is at least one person who does. Ben Greenman e-mailed me yesterday to say:

Alex Hermann, an autistic teenager who lives outside of Chicago, has a perfect bracket so far. He got Northern Iowa. He got Cornell. He got Ohio. The odds of that are about 1 in 13.5 million, which is like if I put a comb in the pocket of one person in Florida and asked you to guess which one.

Alex has Purdue winning it all, which is a longshot—but is it any more of a longshot than Northern Iowa beating Kansas? We’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see if Purdue can take the next step. In the meantime, tonight’s action offers another chance for Cornell’s Big Red to paint a crimson trail across the nation’s brackets against Kentucky and resuscitate the chances of those of us who picked Kansas. Go Big Red!